Monthly Archives: January 2013

A boy’s natural biological urge to vacuum

Now that Santa has rewarded her devotion with a new and useful vacuum cleaner, my wife is no longer crippled by inferior equipment and can finally display her vacuumin’ acumen to its fullest potential. Nobody hits a carpet with more gusto than she does.  If vacuums could pick up juice stains, you’d be able to eat off our carpets, as our children often do, juice stains notwithstanding.

I am starting to suspect that our baby has inherited an appreciation for a quality vacuum cleaner from his mother. I don’t know for sure which chromosome carries the Vacuum Cleaner Appreciation Gene, but I’m pretty sure he’s got it, and I’m equally sure he didn’t get it from me.

I haven’t run any experiments on this hypothesis, but I think a lot of babies would be afraid of the vacuum cleaner, or at least be indifferent to it. Our baby chases it. He follows the vacuum cleaner around as if he wants nothing more than to give that glorious dirt buster a giant hug. He is absolutely fascinated by the machine.

boy chasing vacuum

Vacuum wrangling tip #1: Dress appropriately for the job. A proper rodeo clown outfit tells the world that you a serious vacuum chaser.

I recall him following the old, junky vacuum around sometimes, but I don’t think that was for love of the machine. I think he was just looking for the crumbs it turned up and left behind it so he could see how they tasted. There was no better way to discover interesting crumbs in our house than to follow the old vacuum and sift through its tailings.

boy approaching vacuum

Vacuum wrangling tip #2: If you want to catch a moving vacuum in the open, you’ve got to take the right angle to intercept its path.

Even when the new vacuum is not on, the kid can’t stay away. He has to touch its various parts and see how they fit together. It’s a really good vacuum, but I can’t help but think that he is working out some improvements in his head. Maybe he’s trying to figure out why the wheels don’t fall off, because every vacuum he’s ever known before had wheels that fell off.

boy with vacuum cord

Vacuum wrangling tip #3: Get a firm grip on the animal’s tail; he can’t get away if you’ve got his tail.

boy with vacuum attachments

Vacuum wrangling tip #4: Take the bull by the horns. If you can’t find any horns, take it by the upholstery attachment.

Come to think of it, his big brother has a bit of a vacuum fixation too. If he spots a floor sweeper in a restaurant, look out, especially if you are part of the wait staff. He’s tripped a waiter or two in his zeal to make dining room carpets more appealing to customers. It turns out that carpet sweepers don’t pick up juice (or wine, or beer) stains either.

boy reaching out toward vacuum

Vacuum wrangling tip #5: Become one with the beast. Soothe it with gentle caresses or, preferably, a Vulcan mind meld.

Without the benefit of any professional psychological assessments, I’m going to posit that my family’s fascination with vacuum cleaners is a good thing. Yes, it may be a little unusual, but I look at it this way: if these kids are that enthused about the prospect of pushing a vacuum, they have already set themselves upon the slippery slope that leads to mowing the lawn. When the boys discover how much louder, hotter, sharper, and  generally more dangerous lawn mowers are, they’re sure to want to trade up. Call the vacuum a gateway machine; it works for me.

I don’t like having to fire you, Daddy, but you leave me no choice

We scarcely recognize the number of threats we use to coerce our children into doing what we want them to do. If they talk back, we threaten them with Time Out. If they don’t eat all their dinner, we threaten to withhold dessert. When things get really serious, we threaten to leave them with the babysitter who wears too much I’m-an-icky-old-lady perfume. Tough love, right?

In our house, we would use fewer threats if our preschooler were more reasonable. Sometimes he is reasonable, and we come to a mutually agreeable resolution to a conflict. Other times, he wants to play like North Korea, and we have to start rolling out the ultimatums.

It made us realize the number of threats we employ with our child when he started loading threats into his own ammunition box of manipulative strategies. Then we got to hear what we sound like to him.

I hope our threats don’t sound quite as twisted as his do, but I guess we can never really know that. Maybe our threats fall into the same eyebrow-raising categories as his do:

The Logical, yet ineffectual threat:

“If you don’t take me to the toy store, you can’t get a toy.”

The Completely unrelated cause and effect threat:

“If you don’t give me some potato chips, Santa’s not gonna bring you anything for Christmas.”

The If I can’t touch you, I’ll get to you through your loved ones threat:

“If you don’t put on cartoons, I’m gonna throw this Thomas train at the cat.”

His biggest problem with issuing threats is that all of his are idle ones (except for me not getting a toy). He doesn’t want to hurt the cat; he loves the cat, and Santa always brings me something nice. A lot of grown-ups don’t understand the elements of a threat, so it’s no insult to him to say that he’s still working it out. Coercion is a difficult subject to master.

Vader in toy department

“If you don’t buy me a toy, I will command the Death Star to obliterate your puny planet.”

He hasn’t learned all his threats from his parents, though. One of his favorite threats comes from a cartoon. It’s the you’re fired threat. It goes like this: “Daddy, if you put any carrots on my plate, you’re fired!” This threat is a running joke between us. He uses it to tell me how he feels about different things, like carrots. I fire him sometimes too.

One day, his mother was calling from the next room for him to go clean up a mess he had left there. He went, but before he did, he rolled his eyes and casually told me, “She’s fired.”

boy with first fish caught

“I don’t care if it’s the first fish I ever caught; if you don’t get that slimy thing away from my face, you’re fired!”

I like the you’re fired threat. It gives him a light-hearted way to express his feelings about various situations. It lets him sound me out to see how far he can press an issue with me. Besides, I know he could never follow through on it. You have to be the boss to fire somebody, and he’s not the boss of Daddy. I happen to know that Mommy is the boss.

The little kid with the big wig

Our baby was born with lots of hair, and after nine months on the outside, he has even more. His hair is dark and curly. When allowed to do what it pleases, it stands up tall on the top of his head.

For a long time, the hair on the back of his head was very short, highlighting the coiffure plume reaching skyward from the top. Lately, the hair on the back of his head has filled in nicely, but it still is mere undergrowth compared to the jungle of vines on top.

Big Brother refers to this hairstyle as the baby’s Big Wig. Having been a Seinfeld fan in the ‘90s, I sometimes wonder if this child weren’t meant to be named Cosmo or Kramer. Because of his Big Wig, people have often mistaken him for a girl. So far he is not the least bit embarrassed by their misconceptions. He is very comfortable beneath his own skin, and under the impenetrable canopy of his own hair.

boy peering over tabletop

It’s hard to hide when your wig is always giving you away.

We have an unwritten rule that we don’t cut our kids’ hair in the first year. I don’t know where we came up with this, but it is as solid as if it were issued by the Lawgiver himself. Besides, we all really get a kick out of the Big Wig. It’s almost become as much a part of the baby to us as his button nose. When that first birthday rolls around, it’s going to present a difficult decision.

The latest member of the family to begin to enjoy the Big Wig is the baby himself. He sometimes grabs a sample of his own hair and pulls it down in front of his face to get a good look at it. I’m not sure if he likes the way it looks, but if nothing else, it has become a fun and handy toy.

baby's mohawk hair

Big Brother had a unique hairstyle as a baby also. But his was more of a natural mohawk.

The baby plays with his hair more and more. Occasionally, he even gets some fingers caught in it. It’s dangerous hair; I know; I’ve attempted to comb it. My wife is the only one who is qualified to make attempts at taming that hair. A brief comparison of our heads will inform any viewer that she is on much better terms with hair than I am.

We understand that, at some point, we will have to trim back the Big Wig. We wouldn’t want the child to lose his hands in that morass. Still, it will not be an event free of regret. Never has an unmanageable patch of hair endeared us so uniformly to it.

The Big Wig will eventually have to go so that the baby can grow into a respectable toddler. When he’s old enough, he can decide for himself whether he wants to grow it back. That is, unless he has inherited the same gene that caused the diaspora of my hair from its native scalp. Let’s hope Mommy’s DNA is filling in that slot in the gene pool.

Home is where the warm, cozy blankets are

My four-year-old son likes to sit with me in our recliner to watch cartoons. When I say sit with me, of course I mean sit on top of me. That’s okay though, he only weighs a few pounds more than a big bag of kitty litter and he’s more fun to watch cartoons with than a sack of granulated clay is.

The boy usually announces his intention to set up camp on top of me with the words, “Daddy, I want to be with you.” Then he climbs up and snuggles himself in while I guard my tender spots from wayward elbows and knees. Once he settles in, it’s not the least bit uncomfortable, and it’s nice to watch cartoons together.

Since we don’t lack sweaters or blankets in our house, we don’t like to run the heat too high, even on cold winter nights. My son and I help keep each other warm as we sit together in our recliner. If I can avoid injury during the climbing up and down portion of this together time, it presents what would seem to be a great bonding opportunity.

The other night, it seemed particularly cold in the house. The temperature had just plunged back into January after a short, mid-winter thaw. It always seems much colder after a fleeting taste of spring.

My son was sitting with me on the recliner when he noticed his mother spreading a thick, cozy comforter over herself on the couch. Before I knew what happened, I was sitting alone. The boy was installing himself next to his mother, under her inviting blanket.

“What?” I asked, in the disappointed tone of one suddenly abandoned. “I thought you said you wanted to be with me.”

He shrugged. “I found someone else I wanted to be with.”

So much for our great bonding opportunity.

on Daddy's lap

Watching cartoons in the good old days, before a sudden cold snap left me cast aside for somebody more cozy.